Past work examining the effects of family background on the adult socio-economic status of offspring has documented the important contribution of mother's education. Unfortunately, however, this work does not identify the mechanisms through which mother's education works. In theory, higher mother's education may enhance children's success because more time is spent with children, because each unit of time spent is more productive in the child's development, and/or because mother's education is a proxy for unmeasured inputs other than the time component. The purpose of the proposed research is to determine the relative inportance of each of these hypothetical links between mother's education and offspring achievement. It relies on using a data set which is unique because it is a nationally representative sample which combines information on the education and earnings of young adults directly with good proxies for maternal time, family income by source, and parental attitudes during the time these individuals were children. It is, therefore, possible to isolate the impact of these factors from the independent influence of mother's education and determine the extent to which mother's education simply acts as a proxy for these items when their effect is not measured.